I am about to reach Aarhus after a long day in Copenhagen. We are working with a client in Copenhagen on creating an intelligent conference badge that enables a hassle free event check-in, provides personalized digital signage and a whole lot of other cool features that will ensure a good conference experience.

On the train heading back to Aarhus I had the pleasure of sitting next to a guy from Bornholm, a beautiful Danish island in the Baltic Sea located to the east of Zealand. I don’t know if it amazed him or maybe amused him, but he was following closely as I worked on my laptop, listened to music and followed a football match through a live update service on my mobile phone.

After a while I asked him where he was going. He told me that he was heading on a weekend trip to Horsens. He was a farmer and this was his first weekend off in 8 years, he said. He worked close to 20 hours each day milking his cows (several times a day) and taking care of his big fields. The trip to Horsens was his first trip off the island in 15 years. He was probably between 33-36 years old.

His life was in many ways so very different from mine and this got me thinking. It may so be that well over 90% of all Danes now have access to broadband Internet and almost everybody now carries a cell phone with them, yet there are still people living in this country who don’t have any knowledge or maybe interest in the digital life. They are neither digital natives nor digital immigrants; but live a life as digital illiterates.

Often we talk about the digital divide as something that refers to the gap between the developed world with effective access to digital and information technology and continents like Africa where the majority of people live without access to it, yet in many ways I believe that we are about to witness another digital divide emerge in our own society. This will unfold as the first generation of “digital natives”-children who were born into and raised in the digital world become grown up, something that is soon going to happen.  Our economy, our cultural life, even the shape of our family life will be forever transformed. John Palfrey and Urs Gasser discuss this further in the newly released book Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives, a book that is on my must-read list for the Fall. While you wait for Amazon to deliver the book you can try out this Japanese “digital native level check” and find out how much of a “digital native” you are.